Web Development

HTML5, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, jQuery, CSS3

Web Development

Web development varies in quality. At Lightflows, you’re safe in the knowledge that our developers can rise to any challenge. No project is beyond our abilities.

We have some of the best developers in the business, with senior staff members having big business experience in industries such as banking, retail and insurance.

Using HTML5, CSS3, Javascript/JQuery, PHP, Python and Ruby on Rails to realise bespoke web solutions, you can rest assured that the code we write is bulletproof, tried and tested before going live. Having a smooth running website or app is paramount, so we optimise code for ultimate performance. This provides your customers with a better user experience and keeps them coming back. It will also help your site rank better in Google.

Agile Web Development, Staying Flexible

We stay agile as you need us to be flexible. The old way of working, plan everything up front and lock down specification in advance, has challenges. You want to know that your product and ideas can evolve as your project progresses. That’s why, when we get started, you’ll see results almost straight away. Weekly meetings take place so we share the project with you as we go. This lets you see progress and make decisions before it’s too late.

We believe this is the best value for money approach; delivering better projects, in less time, at lower budgets.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Most projects need a team of developers. Continuous integration is the process of checking in the work we do many times per day. This ensures that the team’s development effort work together. It also means we know new features that work with the existing code on your site or app, which eliminates costly fixes later in the development phase.

Version Control

As our developers work on your project, they save versions as they go. This process is called version control. We use GIT for all our projects.

Using version control allows us to go back and forth in the project, branching off the main code base to test out new ideas or features. We bring all these changes back together when we check-in the code to the version control system.

Inexperienced developers don’t use this process. They might just be ‘saving over’ the older version of your project code.

Work with us and you can be sure that we can scale to your requirements as you need.

Development, Staging and Production Environments

Does your current website have to come offline when your web developer makes changes? It shouldn’t have to. We perform all changes to your site offline in a separate development environment. When code and features are ready to review, we push them to a staging server. This allows you to review the work and approve it before going live. Once you’re happy, we publish the changes to your live production server.

Platforms and Open Source

When evaluating your project, we can suggest many potential solutions. For web apps, this could be a hand-built application using Ruby on Rails or a PHP framework. For websites which need content management abilities, we’ll suggest Open Source CMSs, Drupal or WordPress.

Building eCommerce sites with Magento, Drupal Commerce and Shopify is our speciality. For payments, we can integrate Stripe, PayPal, Google Checkout, SagePay and a whole host of others.

Web Security

The importance of having a secure website is paramount. At Lightflows we know this and go to great lengths to protect your digital property.

If you have a site which stores personal details of customers or an E-Commerce site that holds credit card details and email addresses, SSL certificates are mandatory whenever someone enters pertinent information or transacts via your website. Even a misconfigured content management system can expose security problems.

Because we take security seriously, we always recommend a service contract. Particularly when using open source.

Data Migration

Data migration is the process of moving or importing information from one system to another. Customers often come to us with a requirement to build a new website or app taking data from another system, possibly their current website or application. This may be an older piece of software or a CMS which has become outdated or superseded by a newer technology. It could be that you have a product inventory or list which is exported from your accounting package. Either way, we can help.

We regularly undertake data migration challenges and can import data into your new system in a variety of formats including CSV, XML and JSON. To date, we’ve moved a number of companies from Typo3, Symfony and Joomla to WordPress or Drupal systems. We always take care to ensure that the migration process doesn’t break an existing website or lose customers, redirecting URL’s and putting in the necessary 301 redirects.